1. Field of the Technology
The present disclosure is applicable to methods and systems of storing cut sheet printed media in a sheet buffer, to be inserted into the media stream at the proper time to achieve correct and complete printing job sequence.
2. Description of the Prior Art
In many printing applications, especially with Multi Print Engine Color Hybrid Architectures, buffers allow the batching of the print output from one of the engines to maximize system productivity and reduce run cost. For example, in some of the proposed TIPP (Tightly Integrated Parallel Processing) architectures consisting of a mono and a color engine, there is a need to store color prints in the sheet buffer to minimize color engine start up and shut down cycles.
However, such sheet buffers typically add significant cost, and in the case of the Entry Production Color market, an increase in the precious footprint of the total printing system. The invention provides an efficient alternative to the prior art media path sheet buffer configurations, such as disclosed in FIG. 1.